The final goodbye: the greatest moments for every Pac-12 school

The end of the Pac-12 Baseball Tournament marked the end of the last Pac-12 sporting event before the conference essentially dies and 10 member schools scatter elsewhere to leave Washington State and Oregon State all alone. A few Pac-12 teams will …

The end of the Pac-12 Baseball Tournament marked the end of the last Pac-12 sporting event before the conference essentially dies and 10 member schools scatter elsewhere to leave Washington State and Oregon State all alone. A few Pac-12 teams will compete in the NCAA Baseball Tournament, but in terms of Pac-12 competition between Pac-12 schools, the race has been run and the journey is done. It’s time to say goodbye to the Pac-12 here at Trojans Wire, so before we all head off to the Big Ten in several weeks, let’s begin the process of looking back at the history of the Conference of Champions. In this installment, we’ll provide the greatest sports moment for each Pac-12 school:

Washington State reached the Rose Bowl for the first time in 67 years and beat its rival, Washington, to do it.
The Huskies and coach Don James won the national championship. A proud program never stood taller than on this day.
If this was a football-only review of Pac-12 history, we would include football, but Oregon State winning the College World Series is simply a gigantic accomplishment. OSU women’s basketball made the Final Four, and that’s tremendous, but a national title in baseball is a mountaintop moment.
It’s true that the NCAA Tournament was very small and not culturally prominent or resonant for the first few decades of its existence. We didn’t see college basketball become a major national entertainment attraction until the mid-to-late 1960s. However, Oregon basketball was the very first national champion. Being first is the reason for the Ducks being included here, not just the fact that they won. Also: Oregon has never won a football national championship. Better get on that, Ducks!
If we were talking about the greatest achievements for each Pac-12 athletic program, Cal’s 1959 national championship basketball season would be here, but in terms of a moment — one sequence, one day which lives eternally — it’s The Play, from the 1982 Cal-Stanford game. We should be talking about Cal basketball and the iconic Pete Newell, but the reality is that over 40 years after it happened, we’re still talking about The Play. It’s a one-of-a-kind sports moment which will live forever.
Stanford has won boatloads of national titles in Olympic sports, plus two College World Series. The football team was a national power in the early part of the 20th century and had coaches such as Pop Warner. Stanford has a lot of history behind it, but women’s basketball has been the most regularly successful revenue-sport program at the school. Tara VanDerveer, who recently retired, is a unique icon in the history of women’s college sports. Getting a third national title nearly 30 years after her second one is a moment of triumph which should endure in the public memory.
Colorado beat Notre Dame in the Orange Bowl to win a college football national championship. It doesn’t get any better for a school which doesn’t have an overflowing trophy case.
Utah did beat Nick Saban and Alabama in the 2009 Sugar Bowl, but that was not one of Saban’s best Alabama teams, and Utah had already established itself a few years earlier — in 2004 under Urban Meyer — is a quality program. The 2021 Pac-12 championship means so much to Utah because it represented the end of a long, hard climb to the top of the conference. It also gave the Utes their first-ever Rose Bowl appearance. That’s very special.
This is probably the easiest decision to make of all the Pac-12 schools. There is simply zero question that the 1997 basketball title is Arizona’s greatest moment. The U of A beat three No. 1 seeds to give Lute Olson his national championship and cement Arizona as the elite basketball school it remains today.

Arizona State won multiple College World Series championships, but this is a school which basically created its own bowl game, the Fiesta Bowl, and wanted to become — along with the greater Phoenix area — a big-time sports destination. ASU beating Nebraska to finish No. 2 in the nation in 1975 under legendary coach Frank Kush helped elevate the Sun Devils and the Fiesta Bowl game. In 1978, ASU graduated from the WAC to the Pac-10. In 1982, the Fiesta Bowl began its run as a New Year’s Day bowl game. Phoenix was a small city in the 1970s. This game is a story not just of ASU’s success, but the growth of a Southwestern metropolis which is now the fifth-largest city in the United States.

UCLA’s greatest sports moment has to be a men’s basketball moment. Winning a seventh straight national championship and seeing Bill Walton play virtually perfect ball — 21 of 22 from the field — in a national title game is the best of the best for John Wooden’s dynastic Bruins.
USC football’s greatest team: 1972. USC football’s greatest game: 2005 Notre Dame. The greatest moment? Anthony Davis starting the second half with a kick-return touchdown of over 100 yards to spark a 49-0 avalanche which buried Notre Dame.

Why Davis over — let’s say — 4th and 9 or the Bush Push in 2005 in South Bend? Simple: This led to a national title, whereas those other very special USC plays did not. We can debate this one for a long time, but that’s our call.